It occurs to me that 2C global warming could look like 3.5C in the northern hemisphere and .5C in the Southern Hemisphere.

II Chronicles 7:14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

In general, it will be a lot hotter anywhere on land. But as far as N/S, parts of Australia is already feeling some of the worst effects of GW already. So different localities will have different outcomes, and it won't always be possible to know where to place your bets.

Recent news suggest that at least some of the super-rich are betting on New Zealand, but maybe mostly just because it is far from the 'madding crowds.'

The link I supplied has another scientist, Allen Robock, talking specifically about geo-engineering, specifically albedo management, starting at about minute 26. He says he has 26 reasons why it's a bad idea.

Scientists Are Coming Up With 'Last Ditch' Remedies for Climate Change

As talks aimed at slowing global warming drag on, researchers are pushing new ideas that some are calling last-ditch attempts to avert the worst effects of climate change.

Some proposals are uncontroversial, such as using charcoal to lock carbon dioxide into soil or scattering carbon-absorbing gemstones. Richard Branson, the billionaire chairman of Virgin Group Ltd., has offered a $25 million prize for the best solution in the field known as geoengineering.

Other ideas to cool the planet have scientists worried about unintended consequences. There are proposals, untested at scale and with uncertain costs, to block the sun’s rays with airborne particles or seed the oceans with carbon-absorbing iron. That they’re even being considered reveals both frustration over government inaction and skepticism that policy alone will solve the problem.

“For the last 20 to 30 years, governments, at the back of their minds, have assumed that mitigation is the main way forward,” said Mark Maslin, a fellow at the U.K.’s Royal Geographical Society. Researchers now realize that the planet needs “other urgent ways of dealing with CO2.”

ith an immense scientific consensus that manmade greenhouse gases cause climate change, there is pressure to reduce carbon emissions, but little sign that governments can reach a binding agreement to cut back sufficiently. The answer may be a new material that is a thousand times more efficient at capturing carbon dioxide than trees.

This substance, a synthetic resin, is a part of diverse attempts to make carbon capture and storage (CCS) practical. Mercedes Maroto-Valer, professor of sustainable energy engineering at Heriot-Watt University, defines CCS as “a portfolio of technologies that aim to separate carbon dioxide from other gases, then capture and store them in a permanent situation”. CCS is a pragmatic solution, recognising that we will continue to emit CO2, and so need to remove the gas from the atmosphere and store it away where it can do no harm.

There are two primary strategies for capturing carbon dioxide. The natural mechanism is absorption by plants, which use CO2 to build their carbon-based structures, emitting oxygen as waste. Trees absorb a considerable amount of carbon and lock it away for much longer than smaller plants. However, trees take decades to reach a state when they absorb significant quantities of carbon.

Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?

Three startups, Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat and Climeworks, are making strides with technology that can directly remove carbon dioxide from the air. What they need now is a viable business model

In Squamish, British Columbia, a Canadian town halfway between Vancouver and Whistler where the ocean meets the mountains, a startup led by Harvard physicist David Keith – and funded in part by Bill Gates – is building an industrial plant to capture carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbon Engineering aims to eventually build enough plants to suck many millions of tons of CO2 out of the air to reduce climate change. Its technology could help capture dispersed emissions – that is, emissions from cars, trucks, ships, planes or farm equipment – or even to roll back atmospheric concentrations of CO2.

The Calgary-based company is one of a crop of startups placing bold bets on technology designed to directly capture CO2 from the air. Lately, at least three have shown signs of progress. New York City-based Global Thermostat, which is led by Peter Eisenberger, a Columbia University professor and former researcher for Exxon and Bell Labs, tells me it has recently received an infusion of capital from an as-yet-unnamed US energy company. As part of a demonstration project financed by Audi, Swiss-based Climeworks in April captured CO2 from the air and supplied it to a German firm called Sunfire, which then recycled it into a zero-carbon diesel fuel.

Graeme wrote:Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?

Three startups, Carbon Engineering, Global Thermostat and Climeworks, are making strides with technology that can directly remove carbon dioxide from the air. What they need now is a viable business model

In Squamish, British Columbia, a Canadian town halfway between Vancouver and Whistler where the ocean meets the mountains, a startup led by Harvard physicist David Keith – and funded in part by Bill Gates – is building an industrial plant to capture carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbon Engineering aims to eventually build enough plants to suck many millions of tons of CO2 out of the air to reduce climate change. Its technology could help capture dispersed emissions – that is, emissions from cars, trucks, ships, planes or farm equipment – or even to roll back atmospheric concentrations of CO2.

The Calgary-based company is one of a crop of startups placing bold bets on technology designed to directly capture CO2 from the air. Lately, at least three have shown signs of progress. New York City-based Global Thermostat, which is led by Peter Eisenberger, a Columbia University professor and former researcher for Exxon and Bell Labs, tells me it has recently received an infusion of capital from an as-yet-unnamed US energy company. As part of a demonstration project financed by Audi, Swiss-based Climeworks in April captured CO2 from the air and supplied it to a German firm called Sunfire, which then recycled it into a zero-carbon diesel fuel.

Any idea of the volume and number of these plants required around the globe to cause any meaningful reduction to CO2 levels? Do these plants also remove other GHGs than CO2?

As far as a business model, they can be built and paid for with global carbon taxes. If you put it up there in the atmosphere, you pay to take it out. Of course, that carbon tax would apply to nearly every human on the planet who owns and drives a car.

These crazy plans to reverse climate change didn't get Richard Branson's $25 million -- but they still might work

Grand solutions to the world’s ever-sharpening threat of climate change are usually met with a mix of scepticism and fear.

Geoengineering — the practice of intervening with Earth’s natural systems to stop global warming — is especially thought to bemessing with fire.

Take a dramatic action like spraying sulfate aerosols (water vapour and sulphur) into the atmosphere, increasing Earth’s ability to reflect sunlight back into space, and we might be able to cool down the Earth. But global warming could go into overdrive if we ever stop that cooling process.

Due to a mix of obstacles, none of the proposed solutions ultimately earned the $US25 million prize, awarded to a solution that is scientifically sound, low-impact, viable outside of a lab, scalable, and economically feasible. But Branson remains hopeful.

“We believe with more research a solution is possible,” Branson wrote in 2014.

Capitalisms toxic profile is not just limited to the atmosphere although that is the most pressing one. Its exponential function cannot be circumvented at more levels than we realise. However, if we can stabilise the atmosphere in a way that delays the other risks, thus giving us time reconfigure the system whilst retaining its Englightenment capacity but jettisoning the leaking and creaking economic machine for a truly circular one; I am all for it.

So on that score, if geo engineering and I dont mean mirrors dotted across my horizon can stabilise the atmosphere I am all for it. It sounds a bloody good idea for putting us back on the dialectic route.

GraemeI am quite short on time at the moment so could you possibly link me some non mirror atmosphere remedies, if that is not too inconveniencing. Thanks

Scientists are building a system that could turn atmospheric CO2 into fuel

Scientists in Canada are developing an industrial carbon dioxide recycling plant that could one day suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and convert it into a zero-carbon e-diesel fuel. Developed by tech start-up Carbon Engineering and partly funded by Bill Gates, the system will essentially do the job of trees, but in places unable to host them, such as icy plains and deserts.

Just like these new solar cells that are designed to split water into a hydrogen fuel, the CO2 recycling plant will combine carbon dioxide with hydrogen split from water to form hydrocarbon fuel. The plan is to provide the technology that could one day produce environmentally friendly fuel to complement the renewable energy systems we have now. "How do you power global transportation in 20 years in a way that is carbon neutral?" Geoff Holmes, business development manager at Carbon Engineering, told Marc Gunther at The Guardian. "Cheap solar and wind are great at reducing emissions from the electricity. Then you are left with the transport sector."

Greenhouse-gas emissions from human activities not only cause rapid warming of the seas, but also ocean acidification at an unprecedented rate. Artificial carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere has been proposed to reduce both risks to marine life.

A new study based on computer calculations now shows that this strategy would not work if applied too late. CDR cannot compensate for soaring business-as-usual emissions throughout the century and beyond, even if the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration would be restored to pre-industrial levels at some point in the future. This is due to the tremendous inertia of the ocean system. Thus, CDR cannot substitute timely emissions reductions, yet may play a role as a supporting actor in the climate drama.

... “We did a computer experiment and simulated different rates of CO2 extraction from the atmosphere – one reasonable one, but also a probably unfeasible one of more than 90 billion tons per year, which is more than two times today’s yearly emissions,” says co-author Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, USA, who worked on this issue during a research stay at PIK. The experiment does not account for the availability of technologies for extraction and storage. “Interestingly, it turns out that after business as usual until 2150, even taking such enormous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere wouldn't help the deep ocean that much – after the acidified water has been transported by large-scale ocean circulation to great depths, it is out of reach for many centuries, no matter how much CO2 is removed from the atmosphere.”

The scientists also studied the increase of temperatures and the decrease of dissolved oxygen in the sea. Oxygen is vital of course for many creatures. The warming for instance reduces ocean circulation, harming nutrient transport. Together with acidification, these changes put heavy pressure on marine life. Earlier in Earth’s history, such changes have led to mass extinctions. However, the combined effect of all three factors has not yet been fully understood.

“In the deep ocean, the chemical echo of this century’s CO2 pollution will reverberate for thousands of years,” says co-author John Schellnhuber, director of PIK. “If we do not implement emissions reductions measures in line with the 2°C target in time, we will not be able to preserve ocean life as we know it.”

Injection of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere has the potential to reduce the climate impacts of global warming, including sea level rise (SLR). However, changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation that can significantly influence the rate of basal melting of Antarctic marine ice shelves and the associated SLR have not previously been considered.

Here we use a fully coupled global climate model to investigate whether rapidly increasing stratospheric sulfate aerosol concentrations after a period of global warming could preserve Antarctic ice sheets by cooling subsurface ocean temperatures. We contrast this climate engineering method with an alternative strategy in which all greenhouse gases (GHG) are returned to preindustrial levels.

We find that the rapid addition of a stratospheric aerosol layer does not effectively counteract surface and upper level atmospheric circulation changes caused by increasing GHGs, resulting in continued upwelling of warm water in proximity of ice shelves, especially in the vicinity of the already unstable Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica.

Geoengineering is ‘no substitute’ for cutting emissions, new studies show

"Our study shows that CDR has the ability to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and its impacts for the oceans to some extent - but not nearly enough to counteract the impacts of a business-as-usual emissions scenario."